Hi Tamara, I applaud the soundness of your thinking, but unfortunately, designers who understood the construction of lace and the limitations of production were not as universally available as you might think.
I am thinking primarily of the 19th Century when the industrial revolution industrialized lace, too. 1. The design schools and art institutes only accepted men as students until quite late in the 19th Century. i.e. There was no avenue for an artistically inclined lacemaker to pursue designing. 2. The less well regulated lace industries had more disconnect between those who designed the lace and those who made it. The Honiton lace industry suffered from this especially. Many pieces from the end of the 19th Century were exquisitely made, but the designs were from Mars. The art of the design did not play well with the art of the bobbin. Any number of showpiece laces that were submitted to the exhibitions that flourished at that time are just plain ugly. These pieces consumed inordinate amounts of lacemaking skill and time, but the design was just faulty. I think that any lace designer deserves the support of lacemakers by buying and making their designs and communicating with the designers about their experience with a design. May your pencil never rest Patty Dowden On Jan 10, 2005, at 21:14, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Devon) wrote: > How about having the young and beautiful design the lace that they > would > feel comfortable wearing to trendy events and the old and patient can > make it. *Can* a person who doesn't know anything about lacemaking design lace? When I was young and pretty (though not beautiful, alas), I designed all of my clothes and my Mother made them. But, she had always been making all of my clothes since I was a baby, and always explained what she did and why, and had me unpick botched seams since I was 5 (the same way she started learning), so that I'd know about the principles of construction. Which is why, by 12-13, I was able to pick the right fabric and know how it would drape (or not), and began to design what *I* wanted to wear (there were problems about colours; I wasn't permitted to wear black until I was 16. While I was certain-sure that, if I only *could*, then I'd be as beautiful as Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren <g>). I was lucky in that my Mother was not only skilled, but willing to be experimental; even if she didn't think something would work (or didn't like it personally), she'd at least give it a shot. But she also knew that I wouldn't come to her with something that was totally impossble, because I knew the basics... I know that, in the past, lace designers weren't necessarily people who made lace for a living. But they usually knew enough to design within both "canons" - that of the fashion and that of the "rules" of lacemaking. No? -- Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/ Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland) - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
